The storytelling skills senior engineers need for stronger interviews

By Andrew Miner

Storytelling isn’t usually the first thing SWEs think about when preparing for interviews. But for senior roles, it becomes one of the most important skills you bring into the room. It’s how a hiring manager understands your judgment, the choices you make under pressure, and the experiences that shaped how you work.

Your goal is to help someone who has never worked with you see how you operate when things get messy, uncertain, or high-stakes. Seniority shows up in those moments, and stories are how you make that visible.

Why even strong candidates struggle

Many SWEs underestimate their own impact. 

Without a clear internal picture of what seniority sounds like, they assume seniority means complexity — so they skip the moments that felt intuitive or straightforward. But those “intuitive” decisions often reflect years of accumulated experience.

There’s also a common mindset trap: the more skilled you become, the more you notice what you don’t know. You still feel like you’re figuring things out, so you assume everyone else must be ahead of you. Meanwhile, people around you see you as the steady hand in the room.

That gap between how you see yourself and how others see you is exactly why practicing your stories matters.

What interviewers listen for when they ask for a story

When an interviewer asks for an example, they’re listening for signals like:

• Clear reasoning behind the choices you made
• Judgment that comes from experience
• Habits you’ve built to avoid repeated mistakes 
• How you support others, whether or not you had a manager title at the time
• How you weigh tradeoffs, especially under uncertainty
• What you learned and how it changed your approach going forward
• How readily you change your mind when new data becomes available

These are the things that separate senior engineers from mid-level during interviews. And they only surface when you tell stories that reveal the thinking behind your actions.

How to choose stories that work

A strong interview story always has real stakes. Something hard. Something uncertain. Something that could have gone sideways.

The most common mistake candidates make is telling “spreadsheet stories” — a chronological list of events with no tension, no conflict, and no point of view. Those stories land flat because the listener has no reason to care.

Start with a single moment from your experience where something meaningful was at risk, like a launch deadline on the verge of slipping, a teammate who was stuck, a design that almost failed, or a rollback that changed how you deploy forever. That moment is your tentpole. Everything else in the story exists to support it.

How to structure your story so it lands

Good stories all follow the same basic pattern, and interview stories are no different.

1. Beginning

Set the stage. Who was involved? What was the situation? Why did it matter?  Assume your audience has never heard of anyone or anything involved.

2. Middle

Let that lead into what made this moment challenging. What were you worried about? What almost didn’t work? This is where your judgment shows up — the principles or past experiences that shaped your decisions.

3. Climax

The tentpole moment. The decision, tradeoff, or turning point where everything could have gone the other way.  Or did it go the other way in whole or in part.

4. End

What happened afterward? What was the outcome?

5. Takeaway

What did you learn? What changed in how you work? What habit or “three-prong plug” did you add to prevent the same failure again?

This last step is especially important. Seniority isn’t demonstrated by perfection. It’s demonstrated by how you’ve learned and adapted from your experiences 

How to keep your story focused, short, and strong

You only need about two minutes to tell a great story. The constraint works in your favor because it forces you to elevate the parts that matter: the stakes, the judgment call, the turning point, and the lesson.

Most background details feel important because you lived them. But the interviewer only needs enough context to understand the challenge and why your decision made sense.  If they want to delve into the technical details, they’ll ask for it.  Let your first discussion of a story focus on the big picture.

A simple filter for what earns a place:

• Does this help the interviewer understand the stakes?
• Does it clarify the constraints you were dealing with?
• Does it reveal how you think or how you lead?
• Does it build toward your key decision?

If not — cut it.

Think of it like this:

• Identify your climax first
• Build only the context needed to reach it
• Drop everything else
• Let follow-up questions surface extra details
• End with what you learned

Your job is to offer a clear window into how you operate, not a full autobiography. Tight stories signal clarity, confidence, and control over your own experience.

Be prepared with some failure stories

Interviewers expect you to have failed at things — often multiple times. They’ve lived through enough launches, outages, incidents, and human conflicts to know failure is baked into the job.

So when someone claims everything always went smoothly, interviewers assume one of two things:

1. They’re not being fully honest.
2. They’re not used to handling hard situations, or they didn’t recognize them when they happened.

Failure stories are powerful because they reveal what you learned, how you recovered, and how you prevented that outcome from happening again. They’re some of the most reliable senior signals you can offer.

But not every failure makes for a good interview story. The strongest ones have three things in common:

1. The failure taught you something lasting
Look for moments where the lesson stuck and genuinely changed how you work:

• A launch that slipped and reshaped your approach to estimation
• An outage that forced you to rethink how you validate assumptions
• A miscommunication that changed how you collaborate with other teams

If the takeaway was real and durable, it’s worth telling.

2. You can clearly explain your role in what happened
Interviewers don’t want blame-shifting. They want clarity. Choose stories where you can honestly say:

• What you owned
• What you misjudged
• What you would do differently now

Owning your part is a strong senior signal.

3. The story shows how you made things better afterward
A failure becomes valuable when it leads to forward movement. Pick stories where you:

• stabilized the situation
• unblocked the team
• rebuilt trust
• created guardrails or habits that prevent the same issue again

A simple test: If the story shows your judgment, your adaptability, and your ability to turn a hard moment into a better system or habit, it’s a keeper.

The moments that shape you are the ones that matter most

Every engineer has defining moments: the launches that went sideways, the designs that almost broke, the decisions that shaped how they work today. Senior candidates stand out when they can take those moments and make the thinking behind them unmistakably clear.

If you practice telling those stories with intent, focusing on the stakes, the choice you made, and the lesson that stuck, you make your judgment visible in a way interviewers don’t forget.